Re: [dinosaur] Antarctic Cretaceous rainforest + Linxiavis, new Miocene sandgrouse + more

[Dann Pigdon <dannj@alphalink.com.au>]

On Thu, Apr 2nd, 2020 at 4:06 AM, Ben Creisler <bcreisler@gmail.com> wrote:

> Johann P. Klages, Ulrich Salzmann, Torsten Bickert, Claus-Dieter
> Hillenbrand, Karsten Gohl, Gerhard Kuhn, Steven M. Bohaty, Jürgen
> Titschack, Juliane Müller, Thomas Frederichs, Thorsten Bauersachs, Werner
> Ehrmann, Tina van de Flierdt, Patric Simões Pereira, Robert D. Larter,
> Gerrit Lohmann, Igor Niezgodzki, Gabriele Uenzelmann-Neben, Maximilian
> Zundel, Cornelia Spiegel, Chris Mark, David Chew, Jane E. Francis, Gernot
> Nehrke, Florian Schwarz, James A. Smith, Tim Freudenthal, Oliver Esper,
> Heiko Pälike, Thomas A. Ronge, Ricarda Dziadek & the Science Team of
> Expedition PS104 (V. Afanasyeva, J. E. Arndt, B. Ebermann, C. Gebhardt, K.
> Hochmuth, K. Küssner, Y. Najman, F. Riefstahl & M. Scheinert) (2020)
> Temperate rainforests near the South Pole during peak Cretaceous warmth.
> Nature 580: 81--86

That's an impressive number of authors (obviously from pre-social-distancing 
days).


>From the phys.org article:

"The mid-Cretaceous was the heyday of the dinosaurs but was also the warmest 
period in the past 140 
million years, with temperatures in the tropics *as high as 35 degrees 
Celsius*..." [emphasis mine]

That's not much more than you would expect in the tropics today. Unless that 
should have been 'average 
annual temperatures'? Even that would only be a few degrees higher than the 
present for the equator. The 
average annual temperature for Macapa in Brazil is about 31C, and for Pontianak 
in Indonesia is around 
33C. 

Although the term 'tropics' is rather vague. The tropics of Capricorn and 
Cancer are more than 5,000km 
apart, with the tropical zone covering about 40% of the earth's surface.


-- 
Dann Pigdon